If your Virginia Beach law firm already has a website that receives some visitors and supports your listings in the local business directories, you may be tempted to cut back on your digital marketing investments or stop keeping your legal website current. This is the worst thing you could do. Even if your competition is not that tight and you have a loyal client base, those clients will not spend their life in Virginia Beach courtrooms or claiming compensation from the local insurance companies. At some point, they will no longer need your services and they will stop paying for them.
In theory, new clients should take their place, clients who come to you following word-of-mouth recommendations or after landing on your legal website. In practice, things will probably take a completely different turn, one you should be aware of and prevent.
What Can Happen to My Virginia Beach Law Firm If I Neglect My Legal Website & Digital Marketing Strategy?
The clients finding out about your law firm by word of mouth will want to know more and convince themselves that your law firm really is one of the best ones in Virginia Beach. If they do not remember your law firm’s name, they will look for related terms on Google.
Since your legal website is not optimized according to Google’s ranking algorithms, your competitors’ websites will probably appear first in the search results and steal your potential clients.
It can become a hassle to maintain your legal website on your own. Let Focus DMG help you keep it current.
Assuming potential clients do remember your law firm’s name and they do land on your law website, they will want to know more about the laws governing their case and the legal process they need to follow. Unfortunately, since your blog posts are old, they do not reflect the latest legislative changes. How can a potential client trust you to handle their case when you are not up to date with the laws governing your practice area?
There are even more scenarios showing how failing to keep your legal website current will negatively affect your business.
- Perhaps you have moved offices and changed phone numbers, and the contact information on your website does not reflect those changes.
- Perhaps more lawyers have joined your law firm, but your firm’s profile does not include their name. It will probably cost you clients interested in working with those lawyers.
- Perhaps some of the lawyers mentioned in your website’s About page left your law firm and started working for the competition. Having their name still featured on your website will surely not drive more clients.
The conclusion is simple: your desire to save money by giving up basic digital marketing services will cost you clients and will ruin your reputation. Moreover, by the time you realize the importance of keeping your website current, it will be so outdated that you will probably have to redesign it from scratch and pay much more for it.
At the opposite end, maintaining and updating your website yields important benefits, some of them detailed in the following lines.
Three Benefits of Keeping Your Website Current and How It Can Help Promote Your Business in Virginia Beach
- Regular website updates improve website loading speed and ensure better user experience. Your potential clients will not wait forever for your website to load, and will not force themselves to read content that has not been optimized for mobile devices. It is in your best interest to keep your website up-to-date with customer trends and technology.
- Posting regular SEO-optimized, user-driven quality content will improve your website’s ranking and help promote your business and grow your audience. Every new post on your blog is another answer you give to anyone looking for advice and information related to your practice area. It is also another reason you give Google and the other search engines to choose your website before those of your competitors when putting together search results.
- Continuous website monitoring, maintenance, and update services can help you identify user preferences and trends and use those findings to your benefit. For example, by monitoring traffic and post interactions, you can find out which blog posts draw more attention and focus on creating more similar or even better posts. By interacting with your website visitors through comments and instant chat services, you can find out more about their needs and interests, and answer those needs and interests in the content you publish.
Why a Current Website and an Ongoing Digital Marketing Strategy Are Vital to Your Virginia Beach Law Firm’s Success
Google changed their website ranking algorithms twelve times in 2017 alone, and there is no telling what they have in store for 2018. The changes in Virginia laws were quite numerous in 2017, as well. Also, specialists announce important shifts in digital marketing trends for 2018.
If your legal website does not reflect these changes and more, if it does not keep up with trends and customer expectations, all the efforts you have made to promote your business will be useless. The real challenge in small business marketing, in Virginia Beach and everywhere else, is not reaching the top of your niche or practice area, but staying there.
If you neglect your website, you will compromise all the previously made investments. You will also dig a hole in your own budget, on one hand by losing customers, and on the other hand by having to start your small business marketing efforts from scratch.
At Focus DMG, we can help you keep your legal website current and avoid all the losses and negative consequences described above. Together, we can build and implement a sound, yet affordable, digital marketing strategy that will keep your law firm ahead of its competition and bring you new clients regularly, without costing you a fortune.
Contact us now, and let us find a way to put our small business marketing experience and advanced digital marketing knowledge and technology to work and promote your Virginia Beach business to new success levels.
